1) When booted from Rescue Media CD, Disk Director 10 is unable to see internat SATA drive which is running in ACHI mode.

Impact: Unable to use DD to carry out a cloning operation of the system.

2) When booted from Rescue Media CD, True Image 11 will not let me make a clone of my Ext3 drive to a smaller USB drive. I suspect the issue is that the target is smaller but shouldn't TI be able to resize downwards? Is there a limitation with the CD version where it cannot clone Ext3 to a different sized disk?

Impact: Unable to use TI to carry out a cloning operation of the system.

3) When booted from Rescue Media CD, TI 10 is telling me a full backup of the internal SATA (ACHI) to external USB is going to take 15 hours. There is probably 130 GB of data in total. Target disk is actual 7200 rpm SATA in a SATA caddy.

Impact: For practical purposes, unable to to use TI to carry out an imaging operation of the system; the time taken would be prohibitive.

4) When booted from Rescue Media CD, TI 2009 is telling me a full backup of the internal SATA (ACHI) to external USB is going to take in excess of 1 dat. There is probably 130 GB of data in total. Target disk is actual 7200 rpm SATA in a SATA caddy.

Impact: For practical purposes, unable to to use TI to carry out an imaging operation of the system; the time taken would be prohibitive.

5) When booted from Rescue Media CD, attempting to clone the internal disk with TI 2009, TI 2009 hangs at the step where it (I believe) attempts to remove the existing partitions on the USB drive. I also tried this by first creating an NTFS partition on the drive using DD 10 (in case there was a problem with the original NTFS partition).

Summary:

For T61 with 250GB internal SATA (ACHI) and 200 GB external SATA (USB), none of the methods available in TI or DD can be used to make an image or clone of my system which could be used for bare metal recovery.

Well, I did actually contact Acronis support about this. On 11th November. Acronis support responded. On 28th November. This is what I replied:

-----oOo-----

I have ceased using Acronis TI/DD products because I find they are not up to their promise. Using rescue media there are clearly issues with the drivers and the ability to recognise certain (very common) hardware. USB performance when using the rescue media is dire.

I also suspect the filter drivers installed by Acronis in Vista/XP play a large contribution to either or both of system stability and system performance problems.

I have found running with Vista that the quality of the products is questionable (periods when the software completely refuses to function or hangs for a long time without giving any real context about what it is doing).

I have an impression from searching the web that Acronis is spending more on marketing than it is on development and QA. This is not going to be a strategy which ensures the company success.

Finally; the length of time taken to respond to these issues is laughable. In the mean time I have solved the problems I have through a variety of other means; most of which are using FREE tools which actually WORK.

-----oOo-----

Anyone looking for alternatives should check out PartImage and PartEdMagic as a starting point. These are linux based - but so is the TI/DD rescue media. Only difference is they don't try to look like Windows.